Philosophy
Printer-friendly versionKant and the meaning of the “Anschaung”
I tackle this subject again.
The most difficult single word for me (and for many, I think) in all of Kant is the Anschauung, the at-look or on-look. When you tell a a German that you see a face in the cloud and he cannot, he says, “that’s your Anschauung”.
I have tended to translate this with “envisagement”, for I like the idea of “envisage”. What shall we say to translate the German? “that’s the way you are looking at the cloud”, “that’s your envisagement, your take, your view.”
It is certainly true that the face is not in the cloud, but entirely in the looking. The face in the cloud is what Kant calls an Erscheinung, a shinning forth, an appearance. I used to use “specter” for that, but more recently I am coming to the more generally accepted translation of “appearance”, the “looks of something”. The cloud has the looks of a face, at least as I view it, and as I look and as I see.
Anschauung is usually translated as “intuition”, but I haven’t like that because it seems to vague for me. By intuition we usually mean a recognition which is direct and without need for any reasoning. And this is true for the Anschauung, for the face is seen immediately, and even though we know it is the play of our imagination, nevertheless it is no play or make-believe that we see a face–we do in fact see a face in the cloud. But again I like more the idea of envisaging or in-looking, seeing something in the looking.
Now I want to give one of Kant’s examples, in his reasoning about the source of certitude in mathematics which has to do with the anschauung. We can imagine a triangle in our brains, and we can then also do something rather special, we can project that triangle out into the space before our eyes and actually see it there. That is what Kant calls a “reine Anschauung”, a pure envisagement (and here is where I think “intuition” is less satisfying). We picture it out in space and see it there and can point it out. We see the triangle as well as we can see the face in the cloud, i.e., we can actually trace it out and point it out to others to also see. But unlike the face in the cloud, this sighting is certain and objective (for all can see it). And all it is is our imagination thrusting something into the space before our eyes. But also where we then see it shimmering, as it were.
And so to say that some sighting is a product of our own envisagement or Anschauung means that it is something personal and immediate and direct and individual and which we ourselves project and what we actually in fact see as some object. The fact that some anschauungs are objective, despite being subjective, refers to those situations (the triangle in mid air) where we ourselves have provided an object (which is true with all envisagements in general) and which is in this objective case truly there and all can see it (unless you are a very young child who thinks a pantomimic tracing in mid air is merely a trick an adult is playing on him, and where he sees nothing there but empty space).
This is certainly a matter of what we commonly call the perspective. To use the terms here and there is a matter of perspective, how we are situated in the world and how we are looking. Kant points out that here and there are obviously not in the appearances, but solely and entirely in the envisagement of, or looking at, the appearances. Here is (I see as) usually very close to me, while there is usually further away. So obviously it is not in the appearance, but only in the Anschauung, the “take” on the appearances, or how we look and see the appearances and how they look to us. Time is also a way of looking at things. It is one thing to see a tree and another thing to see the tree now (as opposed to earlier). And all the memories, as active memories, are always now, and so it is a way of looking at them to classify this “now” of the images (of some memory) as “before”. Kant notes that it is impossible to be given any “before” in all the possible appearances; this is simply our take on the appearances, and how we look at them.
Since we cannot recognize anything without seeing it, and we cannot see anything except when we are looking, it follows that the form of our looking (space and time) will color everything that we can ever see. This is Kant’s justification of the application of the concepts of space and time to the appearances. We can only see in space and time if we are looking in terms of space and time.
All that we can ever see within the brainarium (the visible and sensitive projection within the brain at the far end of the nerves) is a function of our looking, our take on things, our Anschauung. And no matter what we envisage and thus see when we look, we can know that it is a function of our own looking.
Later in the Transcendental Analytic Kant will undertake to explain how it is that we are able to distinguish the face in the cloud from the face on the front of a person’s head, and know that one is a product of our looking while the other is objectively and there whether we are looking or not. The face in the cloud, we come to realize and say, goes out of existence when we blink our eyes, but the face on the head remains whether we are looking on not.*
[* The solution goes sort of like this with regard to the face on the front of the head. We have a connective mental device called understanding which works in terms of such concepts as cause and effect and where necessity is the byword. We conceive of an object which would have to appear as does the face on the head (and we really should be speaking of the head, since the face itself is just an appearance, a product of our envisagement, albeit objective, i.e., can be specified and pointed out). And such an object would be the face as the part of a head which is on the front and consists of a chin, mouth, etc. So as we did ourselves provide a object in space to represent the triangle, here we provide a head in thought, but then which we can see in space in the appearance of a person. See Circles in the Air.]
In general then all of our knowledge that arises by virtue of the senses in the brainarium are a function of the senses and of the envisagement whereby appearances are sighted, e.g., a face somewhere. The envisagement is the form of our looking, the way we look at the appearances. All appearances are forever bound in terms of space and time, and space and time are nothing other than the form of our looking and have their existence only in our looking. They are not independent things which exist apart from our looking within a brainarium. If it were possible to know things independently of our looking, then that would be what Kant calls an “intelligible looking” (maybe intuition?) and that is entirely beyond our ken.
Would Berkeley Endorse the Deflationary Theory of Truth?
Charles Weiner and the Oral History of Physics
Having just submitted an article in which oral histories conducted by Charles Weiner play a major role, I was surprised and saddened this morning to learn of his death a few days ago at the age of 80. I did not know Weiner personally — for an overview of his life, and personal recollections of him, please see this very good post written by his son-in-law, Scott Underwood. I would, however, like to take a moment to reflect on his work in the oral history of physics.
Weiner was the director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics from 1965 to 1974, before moving to MIT where he spent the rest of his career. I was a postdoctoral historian at the Center from 2007 to 2010 (albeit at a new facility in College Park, Maryland; not the New York City offices where Weiner worked). During my time there, the co-located Niels Bohr Library and Archives began putting its oral history collections online, and I was asked to pick out some audio samples to complement these. Spencer Weart, Weiner’s successor and still the director of the Center at that time, suggested that Weiner’s interviews were engaging, and would certainly provide good material. And indeed they were, and they did.
Looking through these oral histories drove home for me something that had been lurking in my mind for some time: how poorly the written history of science is able to reflect and present the sum total of knowledge that historians of science acquire in order to write articles and books. To prepare for his interviews, Weiner had clearly done a massive amount of homework.
Unfortunately, much of this work had been buried in AIP’s files for decades. It was, of course, readily available to scholars who visited the Niels Bohr Library and Archives, but even they could only make partial use of it, and, in any event, would be forced to condense it down into fragments in their own published writings. Now that archives are increasingly putting their oral history transcripts online, the interviews can themselves become a part of the historiography, and the work put into conducting them can be put to more thorough use. AIP is currently working toward a goal to put up 500 oral history interviews, and many of Weiner’s are already available.
(Here is a link to the AIP catalog’s references to Weiner’s oral histories. Individual entries will have links to online transcripts where available. Even if you don’t have research use for them, they are good reading.)
Weiner’s interviews are a marvel in the historiography of physics. They surely rival the Archives for the History of Quantum Physics (AHQP) project headed by Thomas Kuhn, which is itself now largely online. (AHQP should be considered at least as important as Structure among Kuhn’s contributions to the history of science.) But, where AHQP has formed much of the basis for the truly intensive historiography of the quantum revolution, Weiner’s interviews remain lamentably unexploited by comparison. Although, as his son-in-law notes, his interviews of Richard Feynman — not online — were a resource exploited in James Gleick’s popular biography, Genius.
Ultimately, we are fortunate that oral histories constitute a significant way to preserve the fruits of historians’ preparatory research. In general, this research is simply lost. Historians can either repeat others’ research, or they need to have some way of knowing which historians are likely to know about what portions of the record, what exactly they are likely to know about it, and then they need to be able to track those people down and know what questions to ask them about it.
But, even this, it turns out, may not be a practical way of proceeding. When I was at AIP, as I was preparing to put my ACAP project online, I sought out feedback from historians of physics. This led to the only conversation with Charlie Weiner I’ve had the pleasure of having. He wanted to talk on the phone rather than email me comments. He was extremely friendly, and offered easily the most substantive comments on the project I received. But I also got the chance to ask him about his oral histories, and — and this impressed itself upon me greatly — he said that he had himself been rereading some of his old oral histories now that they were online, and that it was like reading someone else’s words.
Naturally enough, he had forgotten much of the massive amount of history he had investigated in the intervening decades as he moved on to other projects. Even had one known to track Weiner down and ask him about all these things he had studied back then, he wouldn’t have actually been able to tell you about them in much detail. Thankfully, his work was preserved in the oral history program he led as director of the Center for History of Physics (and after), and this work can now be appreciated by all and sundry.
Now historians are presented with a more luxurious problem that already plagues the more formal literature: how to organize and synthesize this material so that it is navigable and cumulative. One reason I designed ACAP for AIP was to attempt to lend some formalization and navigability to what we actually do (or should) know about a massive scientific community, where the historical writing on it is usually limited to a mere handful of its members. Unquestionably, much of what we now might be able to claim to “know” about this broader community was found out by Charlie Weiner, and I hope we can honor his diligent work by continuing to promote it, use it, and build on it.
[This post is a rearranged version of one posted slightly earlier.]
